Alternates
by Beast of the Sea
Summary: In a thousand worlds, they fall in love. In all those worlds, they fall apart.


Alternates  
**Fandom**: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles  
**Prompt**: #8: Lifestyles  
**Date Written**: January 18, 2008  
**Character/Pairing**: C!Syaoran/C!Sakura  
**Rating**: PG-13 (the end is a bit wonky)  
**Word Count**: 2277  
**Summary**: In a thousand worlds, they fall in love. In all those worlds, they fall apart.  
**Author's Notes/Disclaimer**: Sakura, Syaoran, ANGST ANGST ANGST, and all of TRC belongs to CLAMP. I just play with them. The fic is based off of events in Chapter 179 of TRC, so I only semi-own the plot of this fic.

* * *

It happens a thousand different ways in a thousand different worlds. But in all those worlds, they meet, and in all those worlds, they fall apart...

* * *

_The golem in the form of a boy does not know why his first memory is of a boy with his face, shouting words he could not understand and cannot remember at him. He doesn't understand why the boy hits him._

He only remembers what came afterwards in dreams. He remembers hitting the boy as well, and fighting him with a single-minded obsession -

And, at last, the dream ends as he closes his inhumanly strong hands around the boy's throat.

* * *

The golem in the form of a girl was created without even a facsimile of a soul. Her soul was provided to her soon afterwards by the boy, as he gave her energy from... somewhere. Together, they set off on a journey across the land, but...

She had no "first memories". There should have been no indication to her that she was a construct. But always, there was something...

And when the true boy appeared, she knew.

She was just another puppet. And yet she didn't tell him, let him believe she was the girl who was important to him, until...

* * *

The golem-boy does not have feelings. He has no soul. Feelings or a soul might impact his efficiency.

Therefore, it does not matter that this girl is disappearing. After all, she, too, is only a soulless golem.

He does not feel pain, either. He must be able to fight on without pausing.

Therefore, this is not happening. After all, if it _was _happening, he would be feeling pain from the muscles in his chest contracting as he watches her fade away into flower petals in his arms.

His body never wastes energy by producing any more or any less of anything than it needs. He is engineered to be better than any natural being.

Therefore, this liquid is not leaking from his eyes. After all, if it were, then his body would be wasting water for some irrational purpose.

_He does not waste time with chatter. He is a puppet designed to fight and gather the pieces of the true princess's soul, scattered across the lands. If he says something, it is always concise and meant to aid his pursuit of the soul-pieces. He never emits a meaningless sound._

_Therefore, he is not screaming._

* * *

_"The experiment is to be canceled."_

_"I thought -"_

_"The clones are failures. They lack proper souls. In essence, they are organic robots, and actual robots are more efficient."_

_"But we already managed to create clones with souls. The F-AI -"_

_"We do not speak of the F-AI experiment. Do you understand me?"_

_"Yes - yes, sir. When are they to be disposed of?"_

_"Today."_

* * *

She knows that, if they'd told him to, he would have killed her without hesitation. She knows that the boy she thought she knew  
disintegrated months ago, and only a shell is left in his place.

Still, as the poison works its way through her body, she embraces him, and whispers to him that she lo-

...it's going so dark...

...and a starved, unkempt child with long blond hair holds out his hand to her...

A few moments after she dies, a scream rings out throughout the complex.

A few minutes later, the guards know true fear as their organization's top-class soldier turns against them.

A few hours later, a lone figure staggers out of the gate of the complex, and falls to the ground, his blood seeping out of his body.

Distantly, he knows that he should not really call it his blood - it belongs to someone else. And she... she was supposed to belong to somebody else, too... or was it just her body, like his? It doesn't matter.

His left eye, the eye that was never his at all, swivels wildly in its socket, and - his right eye having been shot out in the fighting - through it, he dimly sees light filtering through some sort of black cloth, and then the cloth is removed, and he sees a fuzzy image of a man with black hair and red eyes, which are even now widening...

He feels cold. She was a warm person, wasn't she? He wants her to touch him... why isn't she here... why...

Ah, there she is. She's reaching out her hand. He just needs to touch it, but his arms feel so heavy, and his fingers won't move. He just wants to... just to touch her... just once more...

With an enormous effort, he lurches forward and touches his hand - and in an odd fit of seeing double, he sees his hand curled around hers, and also his hand falling downwards and thudding against the ground, but he does not feel the impact...

But he feels her hand. And that's what matters.

He smiles faintly before everything fades to white.

* * *

"Disastrous. Like the F-AI experiment."

"At least this one did it of his own volition. I suppose we could call that progress."

A large object slams into and through flesh. "She was cumbersome," the enormous man says to himself. "Now, it is time to see how "The Witch" managed to make the Black Steel experiment a success..."

_And somewhere, a man with black hair and red eyes tends to his companion, who seems to now be able to use his left eye for the first time in months... and he knows that he is being watched._

* * *

In a deeply buried portion of his memory database, the robot remembers that the first thing he saw upon activation was not a sprawling countryside during a rainstorm, but a boy, dressed in a worn-out T-shirt and shorts, taking a screwdriver and handheld computer to his components.

"This will give you a soul, for a time," the boy who looked like his custom shell said, "But if, when I come back, you haven't -"

His auditory sensors registered a deep, rumbling chuckle at that point. "This does not sabotage my plans, child," a deep voice said from above the robot's head. The child looked up, fear flashing across his face, but he managed to control his features and instead put on a look of defiance. "Indeed, it may be advantageous..."

He only remembers this during defragmentation of his hard disk, though, and wonders if it's not just caused by accidental reading of random bits of data and processing and conscious interpretation of the resulting gibberish. Or, as humans would call it, a dream.

It has to be, doesn't it?

He is just serial number 5Y40 in the RAN series of humanlike robots, 5Y40-RAN for short. Why would a human have his randomly generated face? Why would any child want to "give a soul" to a robot?

Had the child - if he had ever existed - even been successful?

* * *

She knew. Yes, she knew what she actually was. And as she saw all the suffering the others went through for the sake of bringing her back to herself, she laughed and cried inside herself, because what they were doing was pointless, but she could never tell them that.

They could never bring her back to herself, because she was not "herself".

She was only a robot.

* * *

Her engines whirred to a stop, and she slumped in his arms. She would never operate again - she had been too badly damaged for that.

Because of him.

Because of the boy too, yes, but even if there had not been the boy, she would have been damaged beyond repair.

Because of him because of him because of him -

His programmed "thoughts" went into an infinite loop, and he let out a long, horrible screech, slamming his fists against the ground.

Dead dead dead dead dead dead and gone gone gone gone gone because of _him_him him him him-

_Humans could die of broken hearts, some said._

_Robots were not nearly so lucky._

* * *

And so it went in a thousand worlds... but in one world, they found happiness.

* * *

_Blood. It turned pink, like her hair, when it seeped into the water. Yes. Like her hair._ _And the grass upon which they died was green like her eyes._

"You shouldn't _worry _Mommy like that!" Sakura scolded gently, hugging her daughter to her chest. "I was worried that -"

"We were adventurous at her age, too," Syaoran said, smiling. "She's just taking after her parents." His daughter, happy to be saved from a heartfelt lecture, smiled at him. She had her mother's warm smile.

_He turned to the boy, the lone survivor._

_"Go. Take your creature with you. Find your Sakura-hime."_

The baby cried in the other room, and Sakura squeezed their daughter tightly before putting her down and rushing to feed the infant. "She's right, though," Syaoran said, looking at his daughter. "You do have to be careful. This place is dangerous."

"I know, Daddy," his daughter huffed. "Don't step on any skeletons in case the bones break, don't go to the haunted rooms, don't touch anything that might belong to a spirit. I know, really!"

He loved her, her baby brother, and her mother more than anything else in the world. Or other worlds, for that matter.

_"You killed them all," the boy whispered, staring at him with haunted eyes. Then, he looked at _his_ Sakura-hime._ _"You - you didn't even -"_

_"We're together now, Syaoran-kun and I," Sakura-hime said, the fingers of her hand lacing through his. When her green eyes met his, he saw an odd sort of blankness, and for a fleeting moment he missed the Sakura-hime he once knew. "Please... find your precious person."_

_"Why?" the boy said, looking down at the corpses lying on the grass. "Why did you-"_

His daughter, apparently not in the mood for adventure, sat down and read a book. She really had taken after both of her parents, Syaoran thought proudly, and wandered over to the window.

It was a beautiful day outside; the sky was the color of the eye he had taken from the mage, the cherry tree was in full bloom and the petals were the color of Sakura's hair, and the grass upon which _those _two skeletons lay was still the color of Sakura's eyes. Ah, yes, those skeletons. He sighed as he remembered Sakura's odd request that they should be placed together. She hadn't asked that favor for the others, who now lay in a jumble against the cherry tree.

_"Because they would have kept us apart," he said, and it was true. They wanted to destroy him because they feared he would take the feathers from them - an empty gesture, when it was _his_ Sakura-hime who they sought the feathers _for_-, and because he had taken the blond one's eye. Therefore, they had to die. It was perfectly logical. Emotion was something precious, and he knew that he should only waste time and effort to have it when his Sakura-hime was involved._

But they had been her - and his too, he supposed - traveling companions for a time. Perhaps it was just a desire to see their once-friends both in one spot, while the rest were irrelevant. That viewpoint was perfectly understandable.

It was a pity they had had to die. Kurogane would have been able to assist in hunting monsters for food, and Fai could have amused the children and helped Sakura take care of them. But, then, it was a pity all the residents of the castle had had to die as well. But they had refused to surrender and let him live amongst them with Sakura in peace, and - well - what could he do? He could hardly risk the life of his Sakura-hime by wandering through territories filled with monsters until they happened upon some hut by the side of the road. The castle was far easier to defend when the hordes came through, and far closer to where he had finally been reunited with his Sakura-hime.  
_  
"Monsters," the boy whispered._

_He was beginning to feel annoyance. "Go. We have already told you to do so."_

_The boy wanted to kill him, he could see that well enough. But the boy had no weapons, and he held a flaming sword. The boy could not fight him without being slaughtered immediately, and then the boy could not find his own Sakura-hime. After a moment of horrified staring at Sakura-hime, the boy touched the white creature - which had been making pointless noises such as "Oh no!" and "How could Syaoran do such a thing?" the entire time -, and after one last pause, they swirled and vanished._

_Left alone, he and Sakura-hime embraced._

_They were together._

_And none could tear them apart ever again._

He wondered distantly if the other Syaoran had ever succeeded in finding his precious person. But that wasn't important, really. Just so long as Lord Fei-Wang Reed never bothered to try to disturb his family, he was happy.

And if _anyone_ - Lord Fei-Wang Reed, the other Syaoran, _anyone_- tried to harm anyone in _his_ family, gods be merciful to that fool.  
_  
_His daughter's voice piped up from behind him, and he turned around to see his daughter holding up the book and pointing to a line on the page. He squatted down, ready to explain the answer to whatever her question was. Sakura came out of the other room, holding the nursing infant to her breast, and smiled at the two of them.

All was well.

* * *

Author's Note: ...Note that I said _THEY_ found happiness. I said _nothing_ about anyone else.

And as for Clone!Sakura apparently going heartless... well, y'know, the clones have it in them to do that. Yeah, Sakura's the last person that you'd expect to act like that, but Clone!Syaoran was the last person I expected to see showing feelings (_back in 2008, when I wrote this story_).


End file.
